Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

I had a daydream about a spacefaring story, complete with prolonged dialogue exchange and random bad technological ideas. It was terrible, but fun to go with for a while, comparing Tom Waits’ and Nicholas Cage’s Renfields (there was a reason to do with insects and vegetarianism – I already said this was terrible, but fun to have unspool in my mind.).

I also wrote a new prologue to The Red Palace: an eat the rich story I was thinking about writing a while back, but shelved. Events in the world keep bringing it back to mind. If I could write it in a day I’d probably release it. No AI for me as a writing aid, so that isn’t going to happen.

I’ve also been offered the opportunity to create AI Audible audiobook versions of my novels. The southern accent was fun. No properly Scottish accent though. I cannot do it though, it is such an obvious replacement of human talent with machine resemblance. I use AI for blog images, so I am now officially a hypocrite given my previous anti-AI stance. I have left six finger images in though – does that count for something? I’m not trying to fool anyone?

I wish I could write at the speed of thought and have it be more than amusing mental masturbation though. Hey ho, our future AI overlords will just extract all our possible ideas via implants. You will have 10 seconds to comply.

Of course that misses the point: we continue to evolve through time, our perspective and our insights changing with age. The vistas of youth, some of them, are lost, but new horizons are sighted, new landscapes before them revealed. Hopefully, at least, before the train of our life pulls into the final station and nothing but a dismal platform awaits. (I’m being “up” today!) So I don’t really think all our ideas could be drained from us in an instant, no, they would be harvested periodically, haha!

However, it saddens me to see AI implementation creep further into our lives, and in particular into creative spaces. AI narration, AI art: AI fiction writing is only a matter of time. Instant books, instant trilogies, instant completed Wheel of Times, all tailored to the all-seeing eye’s assessment of your current reading taste.

My spacefaring protagonists watched ‘old’ movies because their contemporary ones were hyper-saturated propaganda pieces they couldn’t stand, and barely escape. I had an idea of communities ‘light jumping’ to points in space where they could receive old earth transmissions unfiltered and watch news that was controlled to such a small extent, by their future dystopia’s standards, that is seemed insanely honest. (Which is how they realized what a bubble they lived in, in their present.) Then they jump 20 light years closer to earth to see how things changed over time, how manipulation grew more subtle, more pervasive. Of course, if you talked to Orwell he’d say nothing has actually changed in the last century, given what he saw in action working for the BBC. I also had the idea of our spacefarers leaving receivers at various distances from earth in order to see it all in ‘real time.’ Of course their dystopia’s rulers would be gobbling up and destroying said receivers, but globes in space hundreds of light years in diameter have a lot of surface, so it would be hard to police.

It was quite a daydream.

The earthbound idea of having all of our activities and choices constantly logged and analyzed would lead to a world of suffocating tailored content, both for the consumer, who gets what they didn’t know they wanted before they asked for it, and for the as yet unknown arbiter’s of that imagined (currently) world who will be able to shape the news, entertainment, and consumption/shopping spheres to their will, and push only the messages they approve of, a dystopia created by overcapacity to watch, analyze, produce. We already have our smart telescreens going with us everywhere, when they aren’t sitting at home waiting for us to speak to them. Alexa, who is issuing the commands here?

That isn’t the world I want, but it could be a world that is coming. It a world we already partially inhabit, a pale echo at present, but it is coming closer.

Here endeth my latest cane shaking exercise. I still have a lawn, and I’d like you to get right off it, please and thank you.

Buy human, my friends, but not to eat. And switch off the devices now and again. After reading this, for instance.